SOHP Receives Funding for Ongoing Projects (2001)

The Southern Oral History Program secured several significant grants during the 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 academic years to fund ongoing work and outreach. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which provided $150,000 in 1998 for the first year of the SOHP's "Listening for a Change: North Carolina Communities in Transition" initiative, has, through the steerage of executive director Thomas W. Lambeth and program officer Valeria Lee, donated an additional $75,000 to fund the second phase of the ambitious oral history project exploring the sweeping changes North Carolinians have experienced since World War II.

Z. Smith Reynolds has also provided two major awards totaling $175,000 jointly to the SOHP and the North Carolina Humanities Council to conduct two week-long Teachers' Institutes for primary and secondary history educators. Held at UNC-CH in June 2000 and June 2001, the programs stress the value of oral history as a method for understanding change in North Carolina's recent past. The first Institute, entitled "Voices of Democracy and Dissent," focused on state history from the colonial period through the Great Depression. This summer's week-long workshop, entitled "Listening for a Change," will reexamine North Carolina Histoy since the second World War. The SOHP worked closely with the NCHC's executive director Alice Barkley and director of special projects Lynn Wright-Kernodle in applying for the grant.

Three grants were awarded to the SOHP in conjunction with its "Listening for a Change" initiative, "Voices After the Deluge: Oral History Investigations of the Great North Carolina Flood," a project designed to document and assess the environmental, political, and economic consequences of the catastrophic flooding caused by Hurricane Floyd in eastern North Carolina during the fall of 1999. The Carolina Center for Public Service, directed by UNC-CH business professor Nick Didow, awarded $20,000 to the SOHP for the launching of a broad initial survey of oral history research possibilities deriving from the aftermath of the flood. Additional funding for an oral history project that will focus on the flood's impact on the elderly was provided through matching $5,000 grants from UNC-CH's Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, under the direction of the now-retired John Shelton Reed, and the UNC Institute on Aging, directed by Victor W. Marshall.

In January 2001, the SOHP received an important grant-in-kind from the UNC Faculty Information Technology Advisory Council (FITAC) to support a project demonstrating the power of new digital technologies to deliver oral history research materials over the Web. Our ambition here is to explore not only greater accessibility to our archival holdings, but to show how new technologies can greatly ease or eliminate altogether many of the obstacles to the ready use of oral history materials by historians.